Child Vulnerability (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, and to speak this evening on the committee’s report. I mention my non-executive directorship of the Cabinet Office so as to declare that interest.

I join everyone else, first, in saying how much I enjoyed the company of the people who I shared time with on the committee, as I learnt a great deal, and, secondly, in paying tribute to our leader. The noble Baroness did a great job in showing how to lead a group of very opinionated and strong characters, while showing all the skills she had as the Chief Whip for the Tony Blair Government. Her deft skills kept us all in control and guided us in the right way, while listening to everything that we had said. I say thank you to the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for that leadership.

I really want to talk about only two areas. The first is the Government’s rejection of the committee’s recommendation to have a national child vulnerability strategy. The second is the recommendation to have more data sharing for the benefit of the vulnerable child, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, remains a concern that we have both probably experienced in another sphere in our professional life. It continues to remain a problem even today.

On the Government saying that they do not want to produce a national strategy, their argument was, first, that they were already taking a strategic approach and, secondly, that a single strategy covering too broad an area of policy risks becoming unmanageable. I thought both arguments were really weak: if the Government have a strategic approach, surely they have recorded it somewhere; if not, I would argue that it will be applied inconsistently. But if it has been written down, surely it could be published. I did not think that was a very strong argument.

Surely the point of strategies is that they are needed in broad areas of complex policy issues, such as vulnerable children. This is crying out for a national approach, with consistency, and to make sure that the right priorities are addressed in the future.

My first positive reason for needing a strategy is that it could provide a definition of vulnerability. None of the Government’s witnesses that we heard from could produce such a definition. This means that there are different departments having different definitions and priorities. I understand that a definition can be a hostage to fortune: the difficulty is that if you exclude somebody from a definition, and then someone later says they are vulnerable, there will be a list that constantly gets increased. But the danger of not having a definition is that nobody is clear exactly what they are talking about, and the aggravating factors that make someone vulnerable. Therefore, I think it important that a definition should be provided, even if it means that you have to add things on to that definition over time.

The No. 2 point for me is surely that such a strategy should set out the evidence of what works in reducing vulnerability and improving outcomes for children who are vulnerable. At the moment, this evidence seems to be scattered between at least three departments—health, education and the Home Office—and I am sure it is across many others too. But there is a danger that what is working might be applied inconsistently across different departments for the same child and the same family, and that does not seem a very sensible way forward either.

Thirdly, a strategy would prioritise prevention. Our witnesses did not really explain clearly that prevention was at the forefront of everything that was being done. There were some good examples of preventive work, particularly for the very young, but it did not sound consistent across all the departments, applied in a similar way.

Fourthly, everyone acknowledges that child vulnerability is a fiendishly complex problem. Each child can suffer unique consequences of such vulnerability. Central and local government’s ability to respond is complicated by a complex delivery structure. In central government, we have different ministries: I mentioned health, the Home Office and education. Local provision is provided by different services. The compound effect of both working together is that it becomes even more complex. Surely such a strategy could simplify and prioritise resource allocation and delivery for those things that worked.

Finally, one obvious practical benefit of such a strategy could be the speedy rollout of family hubs throughout the country, as we have heard already this evening. Not one of our witnesses was able to say that the Government had a policy to make family hubs available for everyone. What we were told was that more bid money was available for more rollouts, but the question for the Minister I offer is: do the Government want family hubs for everyone? If they do, when do they estimate that this will be achieved? It may well have been Andrea Leadsom’s vision, but is it government policy? We did not hear that clearly, and such an important issue should be addressed.

Nearly every witness complained that privacy legislation, data protection and the Information Commissioner inhibited the sharing of data for the benefits of vulnerable children. To be fair, the Information Commissioner did not accept this, although I am afraid that she was the only witness to do so. We are in danger of saying, “Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?” because she had a very clear grasp of the law and understood the definitions. But what was clear is that if the practitioners continue to be concerned about the risk of sharing data, surely the system is not working very well.

The best piece of evidence I can offer is that the MASHs around the country are still in place. We have already talked about family hubs, but MASHs are multi-agency safeguarding hubs; just another acronym. The police use them—they are usually based in police stations—but other people play a part in them. They were created so that different agencies could share information gathered in each of them about the vulnerability of a child. It was the only way to overcome the problem about data sharing: someone from education said, “This child did not turn up at school yesterday”, someone from health said, “This child attended casualty last night”, and the police said, “That’s interesting, because we attended a domestic violence situation last night but we did not see a child or anybody who was injured.” But the only way to overcome the data-sharing problem was to sit everyone in the room with their computer and ask them to share it, once they had built up some trust. That cannot be the right way, surely, if we have to go to that extent. It is not only costly, but is not the most effective way of doing it. Those MASHs were created to overcome data-sharing problems, and they still exist. Why have people still got them if it is so easy to share the data, as the Information Commissioner says should be happening?

I really think that a time for action has come in this area. The whole point of data protection and privacy legislation is to stop the sharing of data. Is it not time to challenge that presumption, in this narrow area, at least?

Could the Minister please comment on my suggestion, which is that if a public servant is acting in good faith, intending to improve the health or safety of a child, they will have a defence in law to an act which otherwise would have been unlawful? I cannot see why that would challenge the proper sharing of data or make the child less safe, and I hope that it would reassure professionals that they were doing the right thing. They would have a defence—not an absolute defence, but something that they could properly claim if they found themselves challenged by a commissioner for the improper sharing of data. I am afraid that at the moment all the advice and the codes available do not seem to be getting through. Cultures can change not by a thousand pieces of legislation, but sometimes by significant acts. A legal defence may be one way of making a difference.

The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, clearly listed the volume or size of this task—it is massive, and at times it seems to be getting bigger. But surely we all agree that one group in particular is vulnerable—young people in care—and, if we can make real progress, it might be applied more widely. The outcomes for them at the moment are pretty awful: they go into the criminal sphere, lack employment and have poor health outcomes due to alcohol and drug problems, and, sadly, they create more broken families along the way. Surely we can get it right for them, but all the evidence at the moment shows that it is not going well. Finally, I reiterate my earlier point: if we had a national strategy, this would be a very clear priority within it.